The Purple Shroud: A Novel of Empress Theodora (32 page)

‘I don’t need the details,’ Justinian interrupted them. ‘What matters is that despite an urgent need to build on his gains in Persian Mesopotamia, Belisarius has refused to go on until Antonina joins him. And Photius has imprisoned Theodosius somewhere even my own spies can’t tell me, rendering all three of them incapable of leading their own men. Our men. The one common factor – and I say that advisedly – is Antonina. Which means you will have to deal with the problem, Theodora. Unless you’d like me to?’

Theodora didn’t need to be asked twice.

The next morning Antonina was sent to Belisarius’ encampment to make peace with her husband and bring him back to the City, while Theodora’s messengers demanded that Photius return to appear before the Empress.

When Photius refused to reveal where Theodosius was hidden, he found that the rumours of the Empress’s dungeons were no exaggeration. He spent five days in a narrow cell, deep in the cellars of the Palace, with neither torch nor blanket, only revealing Theodosius’ whereabouts when Theodora sent a servant to remind him that she could keep him there until he gave his answer. The damp seeped from the cold, heavy walls into his bones, the guard watching him had orders not to speak, the food ration was far less than he was used to as a soldier, and none of this pain was what he had hoped for when jealousy prompted him to reveal his mother’s affair. Theodosius was returned to the City and Photius waited another two nights in his prison before Theodora set him free.

When Belisarius and Antonina returned to Constantinople, Belisarius making a point of keeping his wife under humiliatingly close watch, Theodora called them all to her rooms. She greeted Antonina warmly and ignored Belisarius entirely.

‘My dear friend,’ she began, taking Antonina’s hand, ‘who has given so much for Rome. Who has travelled, as no other woman has, with her soldier husband, to care for him, and has sadly been denied the respect due from the husband who should protect her.’

Belisarius began to protest that he had always loved Antonina, still did, even now, but Theodora spoke over him. ‘I have a gift for my good friend. A pearl for you,’ she said to Antonina. ‘Perhaps it will warm you when your husband is next away.’

The Empress finally looked at Belisarius, giving him a very brief smile: ‘Soon, I’m sure, General? In your never-ending service to my husband and to Rome?’

She clapped her hands and a gilt-embroidered curtain was drawn back to reveal Theodosius, dressed in white. Antonina ran to him, just remembering to kiss the young man as her godson and not her lover. It was only Belisarius’ years of military training that enabled him to bow before the Empress before he stormed out of the room.

That afternoon Photius left the City for the Persian front and in the evening Theodora sat with Justinian going over the religious celebrations planned for the coming winter festivals of the Christ’s birth and Epiphany.

Justinian was quieter than usual and eventually Theodora put her hand over his and said, ‘You’re still angry with me?’

‘Your friend’s behaviour took my general from the battlefield.’

‘He did that himself.’

‘Yes, but she distracted him, and in return you made her a gift of her lover.’

‘It was a game, a show.’

‘They aren’t actors, Theodora, for you to play with.’

‘I agree,’ she answered, ‘but Antonina loves the fuss, the secrets and the spying. And Belisarius clearly likes her that way, or he would have divorced her years ago. I reunited them.’

‘In public, so the whole City must be full of it by now.’

‘In public, so Antonina had no choice but to return to the campaign with her husband. Belisarius gets his wife to himself, she thinks she’s won when actually she’s leaving her lover behind, her son Photius is exposed for the anxious gold-hunter he is …’

‘And my general goes back to the field.’

‘Your general goes back, yes. Out of the City and away from the gaze of the people who love him just a little too much.’

‘Leaving behind the confirmation that he is a cuckold.’

‘That’s right.’

Justinian shook his head and laughed. ‘You astonish me.’

‘I try.’

The easy night they spent together made it even more disturbing when Theodora woke before dawn, sweating and shaking, pulled from a deep sleep by fear. As she groped for the emerald Virgin in the dark of her room she could recall only one image from the dream that had so upset her. A huge pile of bodies, men and women, children, old people, all dead, thrown on top of each other. No care, no prayers, no grave. She fell asleep again holding the Virgin and praying the image was only a memory from the riots.

I
n the week that the City finally felt the winds easing from the north, when the first pale green buds began to push from bare branches, illness was reported near the mouth of the Red Sea. Another half-moon and it was in Alexandria, with the same symptoms, the same inexplicable attacks – a father, son and daughter from one family dead within a week, mother and baby of the same family untouched, the grandmother left sleeping unconscious, yet well on waking. By the time the winds turned fully, carrying hot breezes from the south, winds that usually brought irritation or frustration or anger between lovers with their swirling heat, the death rate was rising in Alexandria and Justinian’s ministers were on the alert. Belisarius led the fight against Khusro’s incursions on the Persian border, Totila threatened real problems in Italy, but the immediate danger was very likely already in the City, carried in by sailors or merchants, traders or soldiers. These were early days yet, but every messenger that came from Africa or the Levant, every ship that attempted to dock in the City’s harbours, was checked for illness among its crew. If there was so much as a sailor with a headache, the ship was sent away to find harbour elsewhere. Not, of course, that every sailor told the truth.

Constantinople’s grand rebuilding programme had meant a fine statue of Justinian for the Augustaion, the stunning elegance of Theodora’s newly beloved Hagia Sophia, the wide and welcoming porticos of the revamped Mese, sparkling fresh water for the Emperor’s fine new cistern, but those who lived on the streets saw the new work in a very different way. For the maimed Hun or Herule mercenaries no longer needed by the military but too old or ill to travel home, for the refugees arriving from Italy and those now retreating from the Persian border, for the many who simply came to the City hoping to find a new life and found hard graft instead – the glorious new buildings were just walls to lean on as they begged. With the threat of illness in the streets, housewives quickly began to limit their market visits, traders cut back on deals, and even the kindest-hearted giver thought twice about offering alms to a beggar in the Forum of Constantine. It didn’t take a doctor schooled in Alexandrian medicine to point out that stopping to chat with the afflicted might not be wise.

The homeless were the first to fall, slipping away to die, away from their fellows who knew only too well that poverty is a soft nest for illness. Next the sickness attacked the whores, friends of the traveller, the women who opened their arms, legs and mouths to sailors, many of the ships offloading infection as well as regular grain shipments from Egypt where the disease had fully taken hold.

Three weeks before Easter, the rope-maker whose stomach gripe had sparked the Nika riots left his country villa for a meeting in the City. He kissed his wife and promised to be as quick as possible: the meeting was important, he would not have to go through the centre of Constantinople, he would not have to meet or touch any illness. The ex-hangman had done well since quietly returning to the City six months after the rebellion. He gave up hanging, went back to rope-making
full time, and found that it might be less precise, less thrilling, but he could learn to be happy with quiet. He kept on with the family business, took over when his brothers retired; his eldest son had just started to work with him, the younger two were still at school and with the benefit of their father’s income might yet make it to the university. And this year his dear wife, with whom he was still in love, had just given them their longed-for baby girl, many years after they’d abandoned hope of another child.

But the City that had skipped his debt ten years earlier caught him now. There was a traffic jam of horses and carts along the Mese. Four bars had closed their doors against illness at the same time and drunken customers were turfed into the street, kicking off an inevitable brawl between faction youths. The rope-maker was left with only narrow alleys to ride down. When they became too crowded, he was forced to tether his horse, hoping the child he gave a coin to would take care of it rather than steal it, and walk through the very streets he’d most hoped to avoid. The illness was carried on the air from the exertions of the fighting, cursing, bleeding young men; or it was in the wine his host insisted was safe and demanded he drink to close the deal; or it was in the sweat of the horse he rode out of town. However it came, by the time he made it back to his little villa where the clean country air felt safer to breathe, the rope-maker felt sure he had spent too long in town.

Two days later the physician was called. He arrived having covered himself from head to toe in rosemary water and heavy orange oil before he left his own home. He stood at the door of the rope-maker’s bedroom, took a quick look at the man now trembling in convulsions on his sweated bed, babbling about the rebels he believed were at his door, and he shook his head.

‘If he has no buboes …’

‘He doesn’t,’ his wife answered hopefully.

The physician frowned. ‘Then the disease is eating at his brain. He’ll no doubt fall into a sleep and either wake well, or not at all. You should check the children and yourself for signs of the sickness, pray that anyone else afflicted might show lumps or boils …’

‘Why?’ The woman interrupted again, her panic granting courage where the physician’s status might normally have kept her silent.

‘The disease sometimes relapses when the buboes burst. Sometimes.’ Seeing her fear he went on, ‘There is a new treatment, using butter to soothe the burning skin.’

The doctor lifted his hands, and let them drop. It was the best of his advice. He hurried away.

The butter eased the heat of the sores when the first son became ill the next day, but a week later the rope-maker, his wife, and his three sons were all sick; within a fortnight they were dead. The two servants and the baby daughter did not die, but both servants fell into a coma, one waking almost three days later, one after four days. Both were hugely relieved to see that while they’d slept the hot, fat boils at groin and underarm and neck had burst, with once-weeping pus and blood now crusted on their clothes. All that remained was the raging thirst from days of no liquid. It was too late for the baby girl. The disease had passed her by, but the two-month-old could not survive three days without even water.

By Easter itself the illness had spread to Palace workers. Tribonian, the legal adviser who had been sacked and then quietly reinstated, watched his wife and son both die in pain, his wife raving in half-waking nightmares, his son happy and well one day, violently ill and dead the next. He made it to
their joint funeral, but his grief was such that he was pleased when he woke the next morning and felt the swollen lumps beneath both arms. He sent a messenger to tell the Palace, dismissed his servants, and locked himself in to die, praying to the Pagan gods he had never rejected. A message came from a monastery in the east that the athlete of God, Mar the Solitary, had died too, ranting about sin and damning heretics to the last, his huge athlete’s body apparently struck down by nothing more than the beginning of a headache and a single boil at his neck. Justinian and Narses sent away all the civil servants they could spare, anyone who wasn’t absolutely needed in the Palace was dismissed, soldiers were recalled to barracks to replace local factional police and firemen, until they too began to drop, their rigorous training no defence against the constantly mutating weapons of the disease.

Continuing to work all hours, despite Theodora’s pleas that he rest and save his health, Justinian managed to put through one last law, banning divorce on mutual consent. He was so sure of his own happy marriage that he wanted it made harder for others to divorce. Theodora’s contribution was to prohibit the common practice of a man divorcing his wife yet keeping her full dowry. As the death toll rose ever more rapidly, among their enemies as well as at home, the Emperor’s legal papers were finally put aside, his military maps, the strategies for Persian and Italian campaigns laid down, all concentration now on the enemy within.

Three weeks after Easter, Justinian noticed a swelling in his groin. Theodora insisted that only Narses be told initially, and then she called Anthemius to her rooms.

Keeping at a distance, in case she herself was already ill, in case he was, Theodora said, ‘Your brother the physician, where is he?’

‘At his home, Mistress, in Sykae.’

‘Is he well?’

‘They’re outside the central city, and we had a message two days ago to say they were all healthy, for now.’

Theodora winced inwardly, as she did whenever Anthemius or Mariam spoke of themselves as a couple, but she continued, ‘Send him to me.’

‘You’re ill?’

And now Anthemius did not look like a younger woman’s husband, a new father with a family all his own, he looked very much like the Empress’s lover.

‘No,’ she said, ‘nor do I want you to suggest that anyone in the Palace is ill, you know better than that. Just send your brother to me. Now.’

Theodora dismissed him. She had far too much to worry about, not least the dire necessity of hiding Justinian’s present condition – she did not also need to see Anthemius, his concern for her all too evident, his worker’s hands reaching out. With the future suddenly uncertain, she had no time for the lost possibilities of her past.

Alexander of Tralles was a very different man to his younger brother. Serious, faithful and demanding, he stalked into the Emperor’s bedroom, did not bow to the Empress, told the servants to leave the room and began a full body examination of the Emperor, with no regard for usual protocol. Justinian had buboes in both armpits, several at his neck, and the beginning of lumps in his groin. Confining his speech entirely to the medical condition of his patient, and not his elevated status, the doctor gave his diagnosis to Narses.